Kata-chan 🍩

a long long post about my drawings

Well, I’ve been thinking about posting this for a while now. I just... feel like I owe my followers some explanation. Even if most of them forgot about my blog and works already, I know there are some who still do remember me and I just feel guilty keeping them in the dark about what’s going on and why I’m not posting much. It took me a lot of thinking to put what I want into words. It’s scary, I’m really scared and I think ... I don’t really know. Can anyone even help me? Since it’s going to be long, I’ll just put the rest under cut.

So. For the past months my life has been kinda.. rough. My relationship ended, I had a really stressful time in uni, since it was the end of the semester. I had a lot of projects to finish and heard a lot of harsh words about my work. I’ve been thinking about opening commissions as soon as I finish my projects so I could buy a new tablet. My old bamboo is starting to act up and I miss the feeling of seeing my hand when I draw. I finished uni on 27th June. Today is 16th July. Have I gotten at least a penny? No. I pretty much wasted the entire time not drawing anything. And it doesn’t really affect me much. I remember I used to suffer when I couldn’t draw, I’d use every opportunity given to doodle at least. Now I don’t do anything. I play games, I watch videos. As soon as I open my art program, I close it again because it’s stressful. It’s stressful looking at that blank canvas. I thought it’s just an artblock. Or maybe I’m tired. Maybe I’m exhausted physically and emotionally and I need some rest. But it’s not that. I keep thinking about drawing, I think about what I want to draw, I look through artworks, tutorials, tips, speedpaints every single day. But I don’t draw myself. I’m scared because I know I’ll fuck up. I know it’ll come out bad and I’ll just disappoint myself. I know there’s this whole thing about how your expectations and your skill go through different phases, sometimes your expectations are higher than your skill, then your skill is higher than your expectations. It goes back and forth. But fuck, it’s like my expectations skyrocketed to Jupiter, while my skill is somewhere on the ground level. I tried to do redraws of my old works, I tried to work on my anatomy, I tried different styles. It just all looks so wrong to me, I wouldn’t want to show anyone. It got to the point when I really don’t want to even start drawing, because I know I’ll end up hating it anyway - so what’s the point? It’s a waste of time. I know I need to make mistakes and fuck up a bunch to improve. I know artists say ‘go and be bad at it, then you’ll get good at it’, but it’s like my brain refuses the first step. If I’m not good at it then what’s the point of doing it - I think. I look at my friends improving, making great artworks, achieving things - and then I look back at myself. I’m tired of drawing headshots over and over, but that’s the only thing I don’t fuck up much. Though lately, even those look bad to me. I’m scared I’m slowly burning out. I’m scared of drawing because with each disappointment I get less and less interested in drawing. And I hate it, because drawing is all I have. I can’t do anything else, really. I don’t have any other passion. I just feel so dull with everything. I still have art on my waitlist that I owe people, but how can I send them something I can’t even look at? It’s just not right. I wish I felt happy when drawing, like I did back then. When I was younger, my art was far from good, but yet I loved it and did it. My artworks were interesting, I would draw dynamic poses and multiple characters, and I didn’t care if I fucked up the anatomy or not. I had no fears, I just put what I had in my mind on paper the best I can. But now I’m stressed. It came out wrong, I can’t post it anywhere, what if someone comes and points it out? I’ll die of embarrassment. People have certain expectations of me. /I/ have expectations. Expectations that I can’t meet. And I can’t meet them because I can’t draw. And I can’t draw because I can’t meet my expectations. It’s an endless cycle. Can I ever get out of it? If you got through all this text until here, I congratulate you. And thank you so much for reading this. I just feel helpless, scared and down. I really want to just draw again.